If you're distro hopping, today's trend for people who can't make a decision in choosing the perfect GNU/linux distribution for their needs, we recommend taking KaOS for a test drive, an elegant and rolling operating system built from scratch.

It's probably a bit later than others, but KaOS Linux just got its first ISO respin for 2017, and what better way to celebrate the new year than with a fresh new look. It's Midna artwork received a major updated, bringing a brand-new SDDM login manager theme that promises to make it easier to select between the classic and next-gen Wayland KDE Plasma desktop environment sessions.

Additionally, KaOS now uses a right vertical panel by default, as you can see from the screenshot gallery attached at the end of the article. To accompany the new look of the distribution, there are also the latest KDE technologies, including KDE Plasma 5.8.5 LTS, KDE Applications 16.12, KDE Frameworks 5.29.0, and, of course, Qt 5.7.1, while still powered by Linux kernel 4.8, which includes some interesting changes.

"Linux 4.8.15 has a change as to how the kernel image is created. Instead of using an install file that only gets called on kernel updates, a new hook file is used. Advantage of this is that image creation is now triggered for many more instances like filesystem and systemd updates, so you won’t see the mismatched systemd version on systemd updates without manually updating the kernel image," explained the developers.

The base of the system got some major updates

It wouldn't be possible to ship a new ISO respin of KaOS without all the goodies that have been released in the stable software repositories during the month of December 2016, and KaOS 2017.01 is bundled with some major update to the base system, which includes systemd 232, Boost 1.62.0, Mesa 13.0.2, FFmpeg 3.2, GStreamer 1.10.2, ICU 58.2, Ruby 2.4.0, Hunspell 1.6.0, GPGME 1.8.0, and Openjpeg 2 2.1.2.

It also looks like KaOS Linux might be the first distro of 2017 to ship with the Calamares 2.5 universal installer framework as default graphical installer, though we don't see an official release just yet. Anyway, if you're using the distro, you should already have all the shiny new stuff showcased here if you've applied all the available updates. Meanwhile, newcomers can download the KaOS 2017.01 ISO right now from our website.